by Dan Gutman
“This is the heart of Washington,” Dr. McDonald said as they emerged from the station. They walked a short way down Seventh Street and made a right on F Street. “The White House is about seven blocks that way. The Capitol is about seven blocks the other way. And Ford’s Theatre is right around the corner from here. That’s where Abraham Lincoln was shot, you know.”
“We know,” said Coke, who knew just about everything, and didn’t particularly enjoy hearing things he already knew.
The Spy Museum is directly across the street from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. After they paid their admission, the McDonalds were taken by elevator—along with a bunch of other people—to a little room. There, they were instructed to choose a cover identity from a bunch of choices displayed on the walls. Just like real spies, the McDonalds had to memorize important details of their fake lives—like their names, where they were born, what they did for a living, and where they were going. After that, visitors were free to roam around the exhibits.
If you ever go to Washington, you have to go to the Spy Museum. It’s the only public museum in the United States that is solely dedicated to espionage, and it covers the history of spying from biblical times to the present day.
There are exhibits devoted to concealment devices, sabotage weapons, intelligence gathering, audio surveillance, threat analysis, maintaining one’s cover, and dead drops. A dead drop is a place—like a hole in a tree—where a spy will leave something for another spy to pick up. That’s as opposed to a live drop, in which two spies will pass something—like a briefcase—from one to the other in person.
In the display cases, they have lots of cool stuff like lipstick pistols, microdots, and cameras hidden in everything from pens to buttonholes. One room is devoted to hero pigeons, which were once used to carry secret messages. Before the days of satellite surveillance, pigeons even wore tiny cameras to take photos from the sky. There is also a section devoted to famous spies who led double lives. Some of them were caught, and sometimes executed.
“Did you know that Julia Child, the French chef on TV, was a spy?” Pep asked her brother.
“Sure I did,” Coke replied.
In fact, he had no idea that Julia Child was a spy. He didn’t even know who Julia Child was. But he didn’t like the idea of his sister—or anybody—knowing something he didn’t.
Pep, of course, knew a lot of this already, because espionage was one of her obsessions. (The other was the Donner Party, which you would know if you read The Genius Files: Mission Unstoppable.) But she enjoyed seeing all this stuff with her own eyes. It was like the museum had been built just for her.
Coke and Pep were fascinated by spy paraphernalia, while their parents were more interested in cyberspying—how countries are using the internet to spy on one another and disrupt communications systems. The kids and grown-ups agreed to split up and meet in front of the museum when everybody was finished.
“Hey, check this out,” Coke told his sister after his parents left, “a dog doo transmitter!”
In fact, it was for real. Inside a glass display case was a long lump of what looked to be either a Snickers bar or a dog poop. The plaque on the wall said that hidden inside it was an actual radio transmitter that the CIA used in 1970.
Toward the end of the exhibits, off in a dark corner and leaning against a fake brick wall, was a statue of a man. He was tall, dressed up in a trench coat, dark glasses, black gloves, and a hat. He was carrying a briefcase. The statue looked just like a typical spy from an old movie. The twins walked up to it.
“It looks so lifelike,” Pep said. “But it’s just a dummy.”
Suddenly, the statue moved its hand and put it over Pep’s mouth. She tried to scream, but the sound was muffled.
“Who ya calling a dummy?” the “statue” asked.
For a moment, Coke almost lost control of his bladder.
“What the—,” he said instead.
“Shhhhhhhhhhh!” the guy in the trench coat said, removing his hand from Pep’s mouth. “You’ll blow my cover.”
“Are you a spy?” Pep asked, trembling.
“Do I look like a spy?” the guy asked.
“Yes.”
“Then I’m not a spy. Because if I was a spy and I looked like a spy, then I wouldn’t be a very good spy, now would I?”
“No, I guess not,” Pep said. “A good spy wouldn’t look at all like a spy.”
“Right, and because I look just like a spy, I couldn’t possibly be one, could I?”
“No.”
“But of course, if people are convinced that I’m not a spy, that would be the perfect cover for a real spy, wouldn’t it?”
Coke looked at the guy closely.
“You might be a bad spy,” he said.
“I might be. Or I might be a guy pretending to be a bad spy.”
“I’m confused,” said Pep.
“See these glasses I’m wearing?” the guy said. “There are cyanide pills concealed in the earpieces. If I had to, I could chew on an earpiece for a few minutes and kill myself. Glasses like these were actually used by the CIA in the 1970s.”
“I bet you’re just an actor who gets paid to hang around the Spy Museum answering questions about spies,” said Coke.
“Maybe. Or maybe I’m a real spy pretending to be an actor who gets paid to hang around the Spy Museum answering questions about spies.”
“Huh?” said Pep.
“Maybe I’m a spy, and maybe I’m just a guy.”
“I’ll call you Spy Guy,” said Coke.
“Agreed.”
“Whatever you are,” said Pep, “can I ask you a question?”
“Shoot. I mean, go ahead.”
“We received this message the other day,” Pep said, pulling the white piece of paper out of her pocket, “but we don’t know what it means.”
Spy Guy examined the white paper, and then held it up to the light. He put his briefcase on top of a trash can and popped open the locks.
“If there’s any message on this,” he said, “it was written with invisible ink.”
“See? I told you,” Pep said to her brother.
“There are two ways of writing invisible messages,” Spy Guy said. “Wet systems and transfer systems. A wet system uses ink that is only visible when it’s exposed to heat or chemicals. A transfer system would use something like carbon paper.”
He took a gizmo about the size of a cell phone out of his briefcase, flipped a switch, and the gizmo produced a bright purple light.
“The message is probably written in special fluorescent ink,” Spy Guy said. “The ink emits visible light only when exposed to ultraviolet light of a specific wavelength.”
“You really are a spy, aren’t you?” Pep asked.
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
Spy Guy shined the ultraviolet light over the piece of white paper, first from left to right and then from right to left. He looked at it carefully.
“So what does it say?” Coke asked impatiently.
“Nothing,” Spy Guy said, turning off the light. “What we have here is a plain old white piece of paper.”
“Oh no,” Pep said.
Maybe her brother was right. Maybe “white paper” simply meant “White House.” But what did the White House have to do with John Bull, or Dumbo the flying elephant?
“There is one other possibility,” Spy Guy said, as he took a cigarette lighter out of his pocket.
“What’s that?” Pep asked.
“The message could have been written with milk.”
“Milk?”
“Sure,” Spy Guy said. “You can make invisible ink out of milk, lemon juice, saliva, vinegar, even soapy water—anything that will oxidize when you heat it.”
He flicked the lighter on and held the flame a few inches below the paper.
“Are you going to burn it?” Pep asked.
“No,” Spy Guy said. “The chemical compounds in milk have a low burning point. As the paper heats up, the chemica
ls turn brown, but the rest of the paper stays white.”
“Look!” Coke said. “It’s happening!”
Slowly, lines on the paper began to darken. A few broken letters appeared, and then gradually, so did the rest of the letters. In less than thirty seconds, it was possible to read the whole message.
DOROTHY’S RUBY SLIPPERS
“That’s from The Wizard of Oz!” Pep said excitedly. “Dorothy wore a pair of ruby red slippers, and at the end she clicked them together to go home.”
Coke and Pep reviewed all the messages they had received:
• July 3, two P.M.
• Greensboro lunch counter
• John Bull
• Star-Spangled Banner
• Dumbo the flying elephant
• Dorothy’s ruby slippers
The question remained, what did all those things have in common? What tied them together?
“Well, I hope that was helpful to you,” Spy Guy said as he put his stuff away and closed the briefcase.
“Yes, thank you,” Pep said.
“So, are you a real spy or not?” asked Coke.
“If I tell you I’m a spy, I could be a spy or I could be lying and I’m not really a spy,” Spy Guy said. “And if I tell you I’m not a spy, that could be the truth or I could be lying and I’m really a spy. So it doesn’t really matter how I answer that question. But I will say this. Don’t believe what anybody tells you. Don’t believe what you tell yourself. Don’t believe everything you see, hear, smell or taste. Don’t believe anything. That’s my philosophy.”
“Great,” Coke said. “Listen, we have to go.”
“Do you really have to go,” Spy Guy said, “or are you just saying you have to go because you don’t want to talk to me anymore?”
“Yes and no.”
“Good answer.”
When they finished at the Spy Museum, the McDonalds took the Metro back to the campground. Dinner was burgers and hot dogs on the grill, followed by toasted marshmallows. Afterward, Dr. and Mrs. McDonald went to see what movie was playing in the outdoor theater. Coke put on his bathing suit and went for a swim. Pep walked over to the little camp store to get a pack of gum.
After she paid the cashier, she went to look at a rack of brochures by the door. It was the usual tourist stuff—local maps, travel guides, ads for Washington bike tours and interesting attractions like the Spy Museum. Pep was about to leave when her eye was caught by a flyer on the bottom of the rack.
Pep looked at the flyer, her eyes open wide. After scanning the first two items, she gasped and almost fell over.
“You okay, miss?” the cashier asked.
“Yeah, uh, I gotta go!”
Pep grabbed one of the flyers, dashed out of the store, and went running frantically in the direction of the swimming pools to find her brother. After two laps around both of the pools, she finally found him sitting in the hot tub, his eyes closed.
“Coke! Coke!” she shouted, out of breath.
“What’s the matter?”
“I know what all that stuff has in common!”
“What stuff?” Coke asked. “What are you talking about?”
“The stuff in the ciphers!” Pep said. “The Greensboro lunch counter! John Bull! The Star-Spangled Banner! And all that other stuff! I know what it all means.”
“Okay,” Coke said calmly, “what do they have in common?”
“They’re all right here in Washington, at the National Museum of American History!”
“You gotta be kidding me!” Coke said, getting up out of the hot tub. “How do you know that?”
Pep handed him the flyer.
“And tomorrow is July third,” Coke said solemnly. “We’ve got to be at that museum at two o’clock.”
Chapter 19
WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?
July third. Coke and Pep enjoyed a relaxing pancake breakfast at the campground with their parents before embarking on what would turn out to be one of the most important days of their lives.
“So, we have a whole day to kill in Washington before the wedding tomorrow,” Dr. McDonald announced as they cleaned the dishes. “Where shall we go? The Air and Space Museum? Museum of Natural History? Take a tour of the Capitol building? We could visit the Vietnam Memorial…”
“Pep and I want to go to the Museum of American History,” Coke said firmly.
“Yeah,” agreed his sister.
“What? I didn’t even mention that one.”
“Why do you kids want to go there?” asked Mrs. McDonald. “How do you even know about it?”
Pep looked at Coke for guidance.
“Before school let out,” Coke said, “they told us that next year the teachers are going to put a huge emphasis on social studies. So we thought going to that museum would really help us with our studies. But even more than that, it will help us learn about the history of this great land.”
“Yeah,” Pep agreed, “what he said.”
It was a total lie, of course. Nothing had been said at school about social studies, or any other subject. But Coke knew how to blow smoke with the best of them, when he put his mind to it.
“Don’t you want to go to the Museum of Natural History or the Air and Space Museum?” Dr. McDonald asked. “They have the Wright Brothers’ plane there. You can see the Spirit of St. Louis. That’s the plane Charles Lindbergh flew—”
“We know, Dad,” Coke interrupted. “We’ve seen plenty of planes.”
“Yeah, you see one plane, you’ve seen ’em all,” added Pep.
“Ben, they want to go to the Museum of American History,” said Mrs. McDonald. “That’s a good thing. It will help them in school. You, of all people, should be supportive. You’re a history teacher.”
“It’s just that I’ve visited that museum three or four times already,” Dr. McDonald said, a little whiny. “I’d rather go to someplace I’ve never been.”
Mrs. McDonald shot her husband a look, one of those looks that said he should stop being selfish and think of the children.
Coke was looking over a Washington, D.C., sightseeing map.
“I have an idea,” he said. “The Museum of Natural History is right next door to the Museum of American History. And Air and Space is right across the National Mall. Pep and I can go to American History while you two go to one of the other museums. That way everybody will be happy.”
“That’s a great idea!” Pep said. “Then we can meet up when we’re done.”
“I don’t know…,” Mrs. McDonald said dubiously.
“Please, Mom…,” Pep begged, making her best puppy dog eyes.
“Are you sure you’ll be okay on your own?”
“Bridge, they’re thirteen now,” Dr. McDonald said. “They’re big kids. They can handle themselves in a museum. What could possibly go wrong?”
“Yeah, what could possibly go wrong?” asked Coke, who in the last two weeks had been forced to jump off a cliff, dipped into boiling oil, drowned in ice cream, and gassed in a rest-stop bathroom.
“Well, okay…”
“Yay!”
The family got a late start into Washington because Mrs. McDonald had washed some clothes and needed to wait until they were finished in the dryer before she could leave. Coke used the extra time to load up his backpack with stuff as if he was going on a commando raid. The can of Silly String he’d bought in the Miami County Museum. The duct tape they got in Avon, Ohio. The Frisbee from Bones that said TGF FLYING HIGH on it. The little bars of soap that Mya had given them at the motel. Other knickknacks he had picked up at gift shops along the road. You never know what you might need in an emergency.
They got on the Metro and rode it to Gallery Place-Chinatown again. From there, they had to switch to the red line for one stop, and then the blue line for two stops until they reached SMITHSONIAN. That stop empties out right in the middle of the National Mall, a large, grassy rectangle that is surrounded by the Smithsonian museums.
It was a glorious d
ay. The sun was high in the sky, but it wasn’t too hot. The Mall was crowded with people out walking, jogging, riding bikes, and Roller-blading.
Coke pointed out the Capitol building in the distance straight ahead, and the Washington Monument, only a block or so behind them.
The kids knew they didn’t need to be at the museum until two o’clock. That was what the cipher said—July third, two o’clock. Nobody was quite ready to separate just yet. Coke pulled out his Frisbee and threw it to his dad, who threw it to his mom, who threw it to his sister, who threw it back to him. Pep was getting pretty good with a Frisbee, he had to admit. She had finally learned to throw it flat, straight, and true. After a while, they all flopped on the grass and had a little spontaneous picnic, with trail mix and snacks that always seemed to magically appear out of Mrs. McDonald’s purse.
Coke had to remind himself—why were they doing this? He knew somebody or something was waiting for them inside that museum. He knew it could very well be someone who wanted to kill them. Why walk into a trap?
If he and Pep didn’t go, he reasoned, whoever was waiting for them would come and get them. It could be tomorrow, or it could be next week or next month. But there was no avoiding it. And if he was totally honest with himself, he also had an intense curiosity to know who had been sending them all those ciphers, and what they wanted.
Coke checked his cell phone. It was one thirty.
“We should go,” he told Pep.
The Museum of American History is a gigantic, blocky-looking modern building. There was a line of people waiting to get through security at the entrance. Their parents walked the twins to the end of the line and gave them a “family hug.”
“You kids are getting so big, going to museums all by yourselves,” Mrs. McDonald said.
“Be careful in there,” warned their father. “There are pickpockets everywhere, you know.”
“We’ll be fine,” Pep assured them. “Don’t worry about us.”
On the inside, she was thinking that pickpockets were the least of her concerns.
Mrs. McDonald pressed a twenty-dollar bill into Pep’s hand and told her to go to the café in the museum if she and Coke got hungry.
